Omri Amirav-Drory’s response

On 12 May 2013, Omri Amirav-Drory, a project leader for the glowing plant project, published a response to my essay on reddit. In the interest of fairness, I am publishing this response with no edits, except for minor formatting, as follows:

Hi, My name is Omri Amirav-Drory and I’m one of the 3 partners running the kickstarter (I will tweet out that this is my username in reddit both in @genomecompiler and @omri_drory).
I wanted to respond to the critique in several ways:
check out our post “radical openness”: This will be totally transparent project – we will introduce a novel concept called “constant peer review” – In academia no one publish things that didn’t work – we will publish everything. If there’s something we do you feel is not right – you’re welcome to let us and the public know. No academic project is run this way (and I know – being in academia for >12 years between B.sc., Ph.D. and 4 years postdoc at Stanford and publishing several peer-reviewed papers – see: [Pubmed]
We take being a good Steward of our backers funds as #1 priority. Our budget will also be publish online and you can see where the money went. None of us plan to retire on this projects funds, all of us have a lot of our reputation raiding on this project
The main reason we are doing this project is to educate and inspire people on what’s possible today. We want people to know they can solve huge world problems by writing code that runs in the most advanced technology platform on this world – living things. And you don’t even have to know how to write code – you can hire biology code writer (soooo much cheaper then software engineers I’m sad to say – hope we will help to change this too).
I was (and still am in my heart) a scientist and a lover of basic science. My wife is an assistant Prof’ in nanotechnology and I see her slaving over grant writing and the politics behind it. The funds for science comes from the public – we just remove the middleman. What we’re doing is more technology then science. After all – we’re not inventing anything new – the only novel thing we will do is use off the shelf methods like codon optimization and some educated metabolic pathway engineering with randomness and combinatorial libraries on this problem. Our screening methods are also easy – close the light and choose the brightest plant.
I know what you mean when you say scientist need to have a higher standard. And I understand that you want us to add more “things can go wrong” part. I feel that what we said is good – worst case scenario we will only be able to reproduce the SUNY results while spending all our money trying to optimize it further. And if you know a better/concise way for explaining the amazing complexity of biology with all the different molecules >90% with no known 3D structure in different transient gradients of heat and concentration and probability other then “biology is complicated” I would love to know.